This volume comprises new editions of all of the known works on Robin Hood, ca. 1425 to ca. 1600, drawn from the original manuscripts and early printed books. All the relevant texts are transcribed as closely as possible to correspond to their originals, including spelling and typesetting errors, metrical irregularities, lacunae, and typographical conventions, with extensive notes on significant lexicographic features. By reproducing nearly two centuries of Robin Hood texts with all their “faults,” this volume offers a genuine and foundational alternative to the “best”-text approach taken by those editions that have attempted to make the Robin Hood tradition more accommodating and accessible for modern readers.

Works edited here derive from two sources: manuscripts and early printed books. Poems from two Cambridge University Library MSS are Robin Hood and the Monk (ca. 1465) and Robin Hood and the Potter (ca. 1468). A previously unpublished fragment of Robin Hood and the Monk from the British Library is also included, as well as a schematic text for a Robin Hood play in a Trinity College, Cambridge, manuscript (ca. 1475–1476). The texts edited from early printed books include seven different editions of A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode and two editions of the plays Robin Hood and the Friar and Robin Hood and the Potter.

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